"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
Has anyone else been having trouble with their forebearance requests for student loans? Mine was rejected becaue my loan is not a federal loan. I don't really know what else to do. I asked about a deferment but was told that because my parents co-signed they would be forced to pay while I was serving this year if I was unable to pay which obviously is not something I want to happen. Help!
10/06/06
We are in MA (2), NC (2), and CA (4)
We are working on a variety of projects:
organizing and maintaining computer labs
setting-up a samba server,
creating utilities to document system downtimes,
planning and designing websites,
contributing to existing free and open source software,
comparing existing software and suggesting a best-fit to npos,
usage guide/documentation for clients,
writing articles and improvising workshops.
We are interest in:
Free and Open Source Software - (tag FOSS)
Beta-Testing the www.ctcvista.org - (tag suggestions)
Fundraising for Technology - (tag fundraising)
Website Development (not CMS) - (tag webdesign)
Next steps:
Blog, Blog, Blog!
Summary of our conference call (tag tamm)
One-on-one phone meetings in 3rd week of October
:)
Ug. I don't have time to reformat the whole list of notes in Drupal (can't just copy and paste from Word) so here's an attachment with the conference call notes from the Digital Media group last Friday, 10/2.
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| ctcvista_dm_oct_notes.pdf | 104.05 KB |
I was excited to attend a bit of the Project Hope open house yesterday (the Mayor was even there!), at their new community building on Dudley Street. It's the first "green" building in Roxbury and a vastly different space than their building on Magnolia St (which is a former residence of nuns), where they crowded both their residential and education programs into one building. Here's the blurb from their press release on the new building:
"The building, constructed with recycled materials and designed to be "earth-friendly" through its use of low-energy elevators and natural light, is fully equipped with two state-of-the-art computer centers, a spacious community room with a projection screen, a number of sizeable classrooms and administrative offices with outstanding views of Boston's skyline. The new building stands as a symbol of hope for all clients that step through the glass doors and into the polished, professional lobby of Project Hope's headquarters."
I met Char, a teacher at Project Hope, at a digital storytelling session I did at Umass Boston and she instantly got SO excited about the possibilities of bringing digital storytelling into their curriculum for adult literacy for low-income women. She ended up recruiting Natasha Freidus from Creative Narrations to run a workshop with her teachers over the summer, and they created a story together about how they created a beautiful space for learning and sharing at the old building and their hopes to recreate it at the new building. (I'm still nagging Char to get a copy of the finished story online...stay tuned.)
Now that the great folks at Project Hope have this lovely new Community Resource Lab in addition to a new lab upstairs for the literacy classes. I'm excited because now Char can incorporate more technology and digital storytelling into her curriculum.
On a personal note, I was highly amused by the intricate catering...even though I had to leave before I got to eat any of it...
Here's an updated copy of our CTC VISTA Project flyer. It's handy if people ask you how to get or become a CTC VISTA. Paul made it but I've been updating it - It's spurning me to want to learn more about Adobe InDesign. I also enjoy Paul's treatment of old VISTA organizing clipart...
| Attachment | Size |
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| CTCVISTA_flyer_fall_06.pdf | 472.89 KB |
MSN messenger was mentioned as a possible way for members of our priority area to stay in touch. I said that it wasn't necessary to use the Microsoft messenger program to chat through MSN. As long as you don't need voice and video chat, you can instead use Gaim. Currently, you would need to use this version of Gaim (get the "gaim-2.0.0beta3.1.exe" file) for it to work with MSN, at least on Windows. By the way, if you don't already have an MSN ID for chatting, you can get one by creating a Microsoft Passport Account.
Produced through the facilities of Malden Access TV, this short video describes the programs of the Cyber Cafe @ Malden Square, in Malden MA. It features interviews with William Martin, CTC VISTA, and Claire Murray.
The mission of the Community Technology Access Coalition (CTAC) and the Cyber Café @ Malden Square is to help lessen the local Digital Divide and the social exclusion that can result by: (1) providing lower income, minority, disabled, and elderly community residents with access to computers and information technology, (2) having the Café serve as an entry point for people to gain IT proficiency, and (3) promoting social interaction and increased community connectedness and involvement.
(NOTE: I didn't help make this video at all, but wanted to help get it up on the web!)
Well lets see, I'ts been a while since my last entry and I should be better at this but hey what you gonna do. Anyway Im working on a new project as well as the other two, I'ts called Citizen Schools and is an excellent program for youth, It Takes locale People who want to teach what they do and puts them in a classroom to pass on what they know. As for the other projects we are comming along nicely. We have set up numerouse meetings with clients and I've started to find some potential Mentors. I think that catches us up to date. So if you got any questions please let me know and I will see you all next month here.
While at the PSO I wore a black t-shrit that said Recoil on it. Recoil is the name of a local free magazine printed on newsprint. On the front is a magazine devoted to local events and advertising, articles about and interviews of bands (local or those coming to town) and reviews of CD's local and national. On the back is a satire magazine of fake and funny news articles a la "The Onion".
I was wearing this shirt when we took the big group photo. That photo that greats us when we all when we click on"vista blogs". The word Recoil has been removed from my shirt. I'm guessing someone thought that it was a possible copyright issue or something. But I hardly think a local Grand Rapids magazine will be suing AmeriCorp for use of the logo.
Bizaar.
In the words of Sam the Eagle, "You are all weirdos."
Peace,
Richard
Comment from Paul Hansen on October 11, 2006 - 11:23am
Thank you Richard for trying to stur-up some controversy but, no, it was not censorship (I didn't know or care what recoil was) that lead me to remove the word from your shirt... and it was not concern for some copyright issue... it was *aesthetics* that made me do it. I just couldn't stand the sight of the word.
If it really matters to you, I would be willing to put it back... maybe in gray rather than white letters...
-Paul
Comment from Richard T. Anderson on October 11, 2006 - 1:26pm
No, that's okay Paul. No biggie.
It is probably better from an aesthetic point of view.
I hope my blog wasn't irritating or out of line in some way.
Peace,
Richard
Comment from Paul Hansen on October 12, 2006 - 12:08pm
Richard,
Your blog entry was in no way out of line. If it was, I would have simply deleted it.
-PH
Comment from Richard T. Anderson on October 13, 2006 - 3:59pm
Good to know.
=O_O=
Oh my. Now that's the power.
Last weekend I took 3 members from the club to a different club in the East Valley conglomerate. The program that they were running was called St.R.U.T. or Students Recycling Used Technology. The members had a chance to learn about the internal workings of a computer. How they go together and how they work. Then they had the opportunity to take an operating computer apart and examine all the parts and then to put it back together. Once together they were given a monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. The kids then had to see if the computer would start up and if not then with the help of the Tech Team leaders they trouble shoot the problems. The best part of all is when they were done they got to take the computers home with them when they were done. I was also allows to take apart a computer and take it with me. I am going to give it away to one of the members who could really use the computer.
I have been working on getting some donations to get some more equipment for our lab. We have 14 computers but we need to update the RAM on the computers so that they do not crash every time we try to load a program. I really would like to get a set up to allow for us to play movies, music, presentation in the room as well. Something like a multimedia center. Some of the things in the room need to be moved around. I have a lot of work to do.
Over the past two weeks, I've been putting together a server so that people across the street from us at UMass Lowell (we're on-campus also) can mount their website files, hosted with us, as a network drive under Windows. This can be done with FTP, but it's still a bit messy. Fortunately, there's software out there, called Samba, that lets you make a Linux/Unix computer act as a Windows server. Here's how we've used it.
The first step is to set up a computer running Linux/Mac OSX/FreeBSD/NetBSD/Solaris... (any Unix flavor). This is a whole blog entry unto itself, but these days, it's not too hard, and it's getting easier and easier every day. Here at the CSL, we have a fairly well-established checklist for doing this, but there are always minor kinks in the process. Since our income is fairly small at this point (getting larger, thanks to some new grants and kind donors), our equipment is mostly hand-me-down. In this case, it meant learning about a new server we'd never spent much time on (memory on it must be installed in pairs!).
Once you have a computer running some form of Unix, you need to install the Samba software. For us, that means going to the command-line (GUI on a server? No Way!), typing:
apt-get install samba
and going through a few prompts. We use Debian GNU/Linux here at the lab, so your install procedure may be different.
I found helpful resources for the install part at:
So now Samba is installed, but it doesn't work right! Surprise, surprise. How could it possibly come pre-configured for everyone? To make things work properly, it means editing a file called smb.conf. In our case, this file is located in the /etc/samba directory, but again, your mileage may vary. You can either edit the smb.conf file directly, or you can edit it using a web-based tool called SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool). I mostly edited the smb.conf file directly, but getting SWAT running was kind of fun, too.
So how to edit smb.conf directly? My preference is to use an editor called vi, but again, you have all kinds of choices. Some people may prefer to use emacs or Notepad (if they're the Windows sort) or TextEdit if they're on a Mac. Just has to be a text editor.
How to use SWAT? It has to be running, first of all. The easiest way to check is to open a browser and type in:
That's right: SWAT is a web server running on port 901.
If SWAT's not running, don't fear: it probably just means uncommenting a few lines or adding a few lines in your inetd.conf or xinetd.conf files. In my case, I just uncommented a few lines in /etc/inetd.conf and restarted the inetd process with:
/etc/init.d/inetd restart
But that's all I know right now about SWAT!
I won't go into much further detail about editing the smb.conf file, because I need to eat dinner, but there are some sections that govern the server's operation, and then you have one section for each file share (thing that becomes a network drive under Windows).
If this sort of thing interests you, and it should if you're wanting to avoid dishing out money for a Windows server license and want to learn more about Unix/Linux, here's a full list of resources, with descriptions, that I've used:
--John
In our teleconference today, John mentioned that he was installing Samba on workstations for his position. I offered to find documentation to help him out if he needed it. This dovetails nicely with my responsibilities, as I was able to post the resources I found onto Samba's page on the Social Source commons website.
BTW, if anyone else is looking for documentation for tools, let me know and I'll see what I can find.
Good morning VISTAs!
I have finally found a website that fits my needs for posting pictures. I liked flickr overall, but didn't like how there was a limit to how many pictures you could post since I wanted to use it for a number of pictures. The site I found, Picasa, through Google, is exactly what I was looking for. Although there is a limit, it's more than I think I could ever use, at least for the time being. Anyway, I just thought I'd share my photos from PSO in lovely Boston! Enjoy!
http://picasaweb.google.com/LauraEHanley/BostonVISTAPSO?authkey=aq0bkXY2qrJqC30Dw8gWhhG-nuU
In service,
Laura
Comment from Carl Seifert on October 10, 2006 - 1:19pm
Thanks for posting the pictures Laura! I hope all is well in Saint Diego. Those were good times at PSO. Its too bad the next time we see each other is very far away. oh well...
Peace
Carl Seifert
Computer C.O.R.E.
Alexandria, VA
My organization, Young Entrepreneurs Society, rented a table at the Garlic & Arts festival the weekend of Sept. 16th &17th in Orange, MA. We were ready to launch blinq.info, our community technology center developed website, designed by our workstudy person from Franklin County Technology School. His name is Dave Wiles and he just graduated from high school, but spent the last year handwriting our site with html. The initials stand for Better Living In North Quabbin and the purpose is to connect the nine towns and to be a system for supporting our Center. Be back soon.
Comment from Patricia Conrad... on November 14, 2006 - 3:58pm
I have been working with a web designer/promoter lately and he is mentoring me as to ways of marketing our website. Roy has designed petershamcommon and orangetowngreen and suggests we sell advertising on all three websites and make the ad dollars go that much further for our customers. He has given me a list of 15 ideas for promoting the site. I am becoming more conscious of mentioning the site to everyone who walks through the door (one of his suggestions). I must remember to focus on getting our site and biz center in the minds of everyone in the area that we can capture. Twice today customers came in to make copies saying that they didn't know we exist! We have to work this thing.
The combination of blinq.info, orangetowngreen,and petershamcommon.com has the potential for serving one another to get ourselves more income to run our sites. I hope to get out and try to sell one or two ads soon.
hi
This is our first meeting after VISTA leadership change. We welcome our new leaders Daniele and Ben. We look farword to an enjoyable time, and wish for our efforts be fruitful ahead as VISTAs under our new leadership.
This is my first attempt at learning to attach tags to the information I enter into blogs with the help of Daniele's demonstration.
Comment from Patricia Conrad... on October 4, 2006 - 1:57pm
Good to see you today. We were lucky to have such good weather and a hearty lunch.
Comment from Kamala Kalluri on October 5, 2006 - 4:15pm
Thanks Patricia. I felt very happy to se you as well. Enjoy this fall weather while it lasts
Hey there folks! Just testing out the new blogging system. Since I'm at the VISTA meeting right now, I won't post too much more.
One of the things I am working on is creating websites for nonprofits. In the past, I used CSS a little for changing background colors, fonts, etc because I saw it somewhere but I had no idea what it was capable of. (For anyone who hasn't heard of it, CSS can be used to create designs for HTML pages. It allows one design file to be used for multiple pages in a website so that changing the font all across a site, for example, does not require changing each page in the site.)
The CSS Zen Garden project provides a webpage for designers to create CSS designs for, which are then posted online. Each of the designs use the same HTML code (so they have the same content) - the only difference is the CSS (including images) design. Of the hundreds of designs posted online, here are a few examples that I liked and think show a good variety of designs: Museum, Pretty in Pink, Obsequience, contemporary nouveau, and Garden Party. Isn't this cool?
PS The reason I am using HTML+CSS for a site vs. one of the CMSs is that some sites don't need to have user logins and have rather static content. But I imagine the CMSs can be customized with CSS...how is that done? I will probably be using the Plone CMS in the future.
Comment from lauren bratslavsky on October 5, 2006 - 3:50pm
Here are some more resources for CSS learning ( css and basic html can be the way to go for simple nonprofits).
Good site to learn the basics, easy to follow: http://www.cssbasics.com/
Also, Open Source Web Design - oswd.org is a great website to get free templates that are purely css based and then you can modify them anyway you want. I used this to learn css also, but in a backwards sort of way. And zen garden.
When you're looking at pages, like on zen garden and you're like - uhhh, how the hell did they do that.... - Firefox has an extension called Aardvark that when you turn it on, you can see the different divs and ids and classes and so on. http://karmatics.com/aardvark/
And for menus - if you're too lazy or time constrained for a fancy menu but want one:
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/index.html
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/list-o-matic/
Comment from John Miller on October 6, 2006 - 8:00pm
I know that Drupal uses stylesheets quite liberally (for example, our blogging pages use a file called drupal.css for the main part of the page and another small bit of CSS for the editor portion). It'd be fun to dig into it a bit more, and I know that Ben, Danielle, and Aliya could probably use some CSS help on the site.
Glad to hear that you're doing a page using just HTML+CSS. A site I'm working on does the same thing, and I was feeling self-conscious about it.... 8-)
--John
Comment from cheryl jerozal on October 11, 2006 - 11:44am
simple site ...creators?... unite. silly simple site sophisticates unite? simple site supporters solidify? ...
Comment from Aliya Abbasi on October 12, 2006 - 3:44pm
Morgan (a VISTA with our project last year) recommended this
"It cuts A LOT of the work out of generating menus, buttons, navigation and fancy 'bells and whistles' for creating webpages
http://www.xtort.net/scripts/scripts.php
morgan sully"
Paul Hansen and I are trying to get some easy notification system working so that our VISTAs will know when someone comments on their blog without having to individually check all their entries.
Comment from admin on August 11, 2009 - 11:09am
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Comment from admin on August 11, 2009 - 11:10am
Proin tortor augue, placerat lobortis condimentum tristique, ullamcorper sit amet leo. Vestibulum ultrices elementum velit vitae dignissim. Etiam tristique molestie orci. Morbi facilisis eleifend est et congue. Duis vel odio tempor lorem elementum interdum. Vivamus sed est lorem, sit amet faucibus massa. Quisque at sollicitudin metus. Ut libero velit, consectetur eget pharetra sed, sollicitudin vitae enim. Suspendisse dictum lobortis urna placerat sodales. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Mauris in est dolor. Nulla ut nisl nec lorem egestas faucibus. Phasellus tincidunt, ligula at sagittis tristique, erat justo facilisis enim, vel gravida mauris ligula a velit. Etiam egestas tortor a nulla imperdiet eu lacinia justo scelerisque. Suspendisse eget orci eu neque bibendum sollicitudin. Etiam at enim sit amet enim cursus sagittis id vitae lorem. Pellentesque blandit felis nec dolor pharetra varius.
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Last week I attended Aspiration's "Web Sites for Advocacy and Community Organizing: Basics, Essentials and Best Practices" conference in LA. The conference was set up as a dialogue around two words too often thrown around by those in community technology: eOrganizing and eAdvocacy. The presenters, Allen Gunn of Aspiration and David Taylor of Radical Designs, defined them this way: eOrganizing: new tools for base building, to grow relationships and to achieve trust. eAdvocacy: new tools for extending the reach of project messages, to engage media, to influence decision makers and campaign targets and to connect with new allies and supporters. I learned a lot of basics I hadn't (but perhaps should have) already learned in my seven months of VISTAing, and I'll soon begin putting my new knowledge into action on the CCTPG site. I think the first step — and if you look at the site, I think you'll agree — will be either hiring or attempting some graphic design. Other than that, everything is rolling along smoothly in Santa Monica, and the few deciduous trees in my neighborhood should soon be wearing flashier coats.
Comment from Tim Wescott on October 3, 2006 - 6:28pm
I had a unique view of the presentation, considering I'm working at Aspiration. :-) Gunner and David did a really great job with it.
Does anyone know if there is a way to be alerted when someone comments on your blog? Or somewhere where recent activity is summarized so that you don't have to look at every one? Thanks!
Comment from Richard T. Anderson on October 2, 2006 - 4:23pm
Great idea! I second the motion that we have an alert for comments somewhere. Either when we log in something that says "New Blog Comments" or an email.
I think we have to talk to Ben about this. Hopefully he is reading blogs, but we may have to email him directly.
Peace, Rich
Comment from danielle martin on October 2, 2006 - 10:46pm
Hey Corey,
I'll check with Ben about the notification, but a better aggregation page is coming very soon, complete with latest comments as well.
-Danielle
Comment from gariet cowin on October 10, 2006 - 1:17pm
What sorts of things do these local people teach? And are these classes free for everybody to attend? I do a similar thing in my spare time, just for fun, and I'm interested in knowing more about the citizen schools. Where does the funding come from?
Anyway, it sounds pretty cool.
Comment from Rebecca White on October 10, 2006 - 4:59pm
I'm really interested in this as well; my highschool had a program that sounds like this. Is there more info about this on the web somewhere? Anyhow, I hope you post about the process of getting it started and what kinds of things are being taught. (:
Comment from danielle martin on October 11, 2006 - 10:22am
I actually got approached by someone from the Boston Citizen's Schools program (Moriska) about getting VISTAs to teach classes in Boston, but it was in the middle of the day and the trainings were during the PSO. But anyway, this is a great plug for linking in your blog entries...the site is:
http://www.citizenschools.org/index.cfm
-Danielle
Here's the blurb she sent me that I mailed to the list:
*Be a Citizen School Volunteer!*
The students self-select a specific apprenticeship and are divided into groups of approximately twelve students. The first week of the apprenticeship is actually a school-wide fair where all the different apprenticeships basically "sell" the concepts to the students. After the week of pitches, the apprenticeships are 90 minutes for 10 weeks with an additional post-apprenticeship reflection session.
The apprenticeship, made up of a Citizen Teacher, staff member and approximately 12-13 students, would run ONCE a week for ten weeks (for an hour). Our schedule at the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, places apprenticeships on either Tuesday or Thursday. The VISTAs would meet with students for 10 weeks, with the 10th week culminating in a presentation or performance of some sort. This does NOT include the apprenticeship fair (where all the different apprenticeships "sell" the concepts to the students so that they are making an informed choice regarding apprenticeship placement) the week before the sessions start, or the 11th week that is scheduled to allow for reflection (teacher attendance is optional but strongly encouraged).
Comment from William Martin on November 6, 2006 - 3:36pm
This is the blurb I got from Danielle about citizen schools
Be a Citizen School Volunteer!*
William B. Martin
CTC VISTA
Cyber Cafe @ Malden square
Mentor and Gateway Project